David Walter

An Australian-born horologist who trained in London and Europe before establishing his studio in Santa Barbara in 1980, David Walter set out with a single conviction: that making new clocks had to be a process of bettering the best ever made. Fellow of the British Horological Institute, Member of the NAWCC, and Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, London. His clients are collectors worldwide who know the special qualities these timepieces possess. Everything — down to the tiniest screws and textures — is made entirely by hand; nothing is procured from stock. All modern Walter watches carry the DWT Seal, guaranteeing timekeeping accuracy to within -3/+2 seconds per day and promising lifetime serviceability.

In 2006 he became the first person to successfully recreate the Woodward Free Pendulum W5 clock; in 2010 he followed with an improved edition of Breguet No. 3671 Double Pendulum clock; in 2012 he added Daniels Perpetual Calendar complications with retrograde date and sunrise/sunset. He is the only clockmaker ever to have made both versions of the double pendulum clock. His latest clock — a precise replica of the E. Howard & Co. #23, 90-day regulator, 87 inches tall — is valued at $429,000. At the 2012 NAWCC National Convention he won First Prize in three separate classes plus the People's Choice Award. Three watch collections: the Presido, the Platinum Watch (debuted at SalonQP London), and the Azur — L'Heure Bleue pocket watch, a one-of-a-kind commission in platinum with sapphire blue enamel. Clients include the most discerning horologists and private collectors worldwide.

The biography behind the studio explains the standard. Born in Perth, Western Australia, Walter began making clocks at fifteen, moved to England in 1971 to work for the Queen's jewellers, and later specialised in chronographs and complications at the Omega service centre in Vienna — until philosophical differences with his employer sent him on a long overland drive from Vienna to India, from which he emerged convinced that the only way an individual improves the world is through quality in everything he makes.

That conviction now operates from a workshop in Buellton, in the Santa Ynez Valley outside Santa Barbara, where every clock is a unique piece: he has made the world's smallest carriage clock at one and a half inches tall, and five of the roughly fourteen double-pendulum clocks known to exist anywhere. The double-pendulum principle is his signature physics — two pendulums hung from the same non-rigid frame naturally swing in anti-phase, each correcting the other's tiny errors — and his (D)W5 free-pendulum clock proved sensitive enough during testing that its rate tracings visibly registered the tremors of a distant earthquake before settling back to flat-line stability. His Homage a Janvier double-pendulum table clock was the first recreation ever made of the famous Janvier resonance clock displayed in the Patek Philippe Museum, and his Breguet-styled Double Pendulum Perpetual clocks, in flame mahogany with fully jewelled bearings, now command around $385,000. In 2018 he was made Free of the City of London and a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers in recognition of a lifetime's achievement; he lectures for the Horological Society of New York, quietly mentors younger American watchmakers in California, and keeps projects on the bench — from a double-movement pocket watch showing mean solar and sidereal time to one-off tourbillon commissions — that suggest the world's most adored timepieces, as he calls them, are still being bettered.